


I've Got No Strings

by Alasdair_you



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Ghosts, Hand Jobs, Handcuffs, M/M, Male Slash, Oral Sex, Original Character(s), Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, References to Drugs, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-09-28
Packaged: 2018-11-15 16:10:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11234535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasdair_you/pseuds/Alasdair_you
Summary: Following an accident that claims the lives of his sister and his mother, Miles moves across the country with his father for a new beginning.  Things don't go exactly as planned when he finds himself in the sleepy New England town of Bridgedale, living in what locals describe as a 'haunted manor.'For almost a century, Gideon has lived relatively undisturbed in his family's ancestral home following his brutal murder, which left him tied to the estate.  His peace is disturbed by the arrival of a moody teenager, who unfortunately has the uncanny ability to see him.  Of course, Gideon knows exactly how to deal with meddlesome intruders.





	1. Miles

**Author's Note:**

> Helloooo~ I'm new to Ao3. I'll be updating this regularly and posting other things as I make the transition to...here. Have some cupcakes.

Miles pulled his hood deeper over his face, further obscuring his features from anyone that dared to pass his father’s sedan on the winding, wet road along coastal Connecticut. Some kind of low, old music hummed and crackled through the new radio like whoever was on the other side was playing it on vinyl and Miles shifted uncomfortably, his forehead pressed to the glass so that his breath fogged with every exhale. Rain beaded on the outside of the window, encasing them in a little tomb of blurry reality within the cab of the vehicle. 

Driving with Henry Kimberly (affectionately called ‘Hank’ by everyone, including his son) was supposed to be some kind of chipper adventure but Miles didn’t have any energy for adventures with his father. Bless his heart, the man was trying, but the teenager sitting next to him might as well have been a blank chalkboard for all the personality he had lately. He was sullen, morose, and prone to spacing out for long periods of time with his headphones in his ears but not playing any sound. 

It is important to note that Miles believed that his father believed that the headphones were playing music when they were actually just a way to avoid having a conversation. Hank was not dumb enough to fall for it, but he wasn’t invasive enough to call Miles out on his bullshit, either.

“Almost there!” Hank feigned excitement—or was that real excitement? Miles wasn’t sure. He didn’t even manage an irritated huff in response. His grey-blue eyes remained fixed on the window and he pulled his sleeves down on his arms a little bit more than was necessary, twisting in his seat like he couldn’t wait to put distance between himself and Hank. Three days in a car with the man would have done that to anyone, to be totally fair. Miles was still of the opinion that driving was unnecessary. They should have sold the car, pocketed the money, flown to Connecticut, and bought a new car upon arrival in their new home—which was a very, very long way from Nevada and boasted a drastically different climate than what Miles was used to.

Hank reached across the center console and pushed Miles’ hood back, exposing chestnut colored hair with a faded blue at the tips that hung in his eyes and dusted his cheeks to just below his ears in a straight, unkempt fringe. The teenager scowled, wrinkling his nose in utter disgust before he jerked the hood back up and crossed his arms defensively. “C’mon, Miles,” Hank pleaded. “You could pretend to be happy.”

There was nothing to be happy about, though. Miles didn’t voice as much. His father was aware of his opinion on this but swaying Hank when he had already made up his mind was like trying to tell a tornado to switch directions—meaning that it wasn’t exactly open to conversation and neither was Hank. There was no Margot here. There was no Clarissa here. There was just cold, rainy coast and a pine forest that smelled of mildew and damp earth. It was an assault on the senses through Hank’s cracked window. Miles found it revolting and his father called it, ‘refreshing.’ Like if they made an air freshener called “pine rot” Hank would probably hang it up somewhere.

The car turned onto a gravel road and trundled another five miles or so beyond the tree line, tires crunching over wet rock as the storm picked up. Miles started to think they were going to live in some shack in the woods like hermits and was growing increasingly annoyed with the entire situation. As far as he was concerned, uprooting a traumatized teenager was Hank’s worst idea yet, but the therapist had agreed.

Dumb bitch, Miles thought to himself. She was just sick of him…ready to get him out of her hair and move him along to the next sorry sap that had to dish out the handfuls of pills to keep the flashbacks and the choking fear just beyond the horizon of his awareness. He swallowed hard, reached into his pocket for one of those trusty orange bottles, and popped an anxiety pill with a swig of coke that was as warm as piss and half-flat. He grimaced through it and Hank pursed his lips. 

A doctor himself, Hank had never been one to roll his eyes at modern medicine. Perhaps it was different when it was his kid relying on psychotropics to keep himself from going off the rails. Miles wasn’t entirely sure of his father’s opinion on the new litany of drugs and he may have (once upon a time) made a snide comment about it but he hadn’t the chance. Abruptly, the trees parted into a surprisingly large clearing and a muddy, wet driveway led up to a hulking Victorian home in dire need of a coat of paint and a new roof. 

The chimney sort of sagged outward and the porch drooped like the house itself was tired after so many centuries of standing sentry to this clearing. Most of the windows were covered in a brown paper, Miles noticed as they trundled closer, and the exhausted looking shingles may have once been a white or butter yellow. He wasn’t sure and the rain did nothing to help his opinion on the possibilities. The shutters (what was left of them) were a slate color and hung at odd angles beside the dingy, paper-covered windows. 

“Looks like this is it,” Hank said happily.

Miles rolled his eyes. Internally, he said something to himself like, ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me.’ Instead, he pushed his door open, kicking it once for good measure, before he stepped out into the rain. He reached one long, sinewy arm into the backseat for his duffel bag and heaved it to his shoulder while Hank fumbled for keys and rolled his suitcase through thick, sticky puddles of filth up to a porch that even a pressure washer probably couldn’t have saved. Miles’ black high tops left star-shaped prints wherever he walked, from mud or dust, and when the door swung open he came to realize that the inside was not much better.

The movers had dropped their boxes in appropriately labeled rooms, but the house still had furniture from a previous occupant all draped in white sheets that were yellowing with decrepit age. A chandelier that was more cobweb than crystal hung in the foyer, swinging in the wind that the open door allowed in. It cast refracted rainbows over a long, wide, spiraling staircase that led to a second floor. 

Miles looked down at the ground. It was ancient woodwork, patterned in a diamond design so that it lined up with the chandelier above it. “This place must have been beautiful once,” he finally vocalized, licking his lips and taking a few steps deeper into the house.

Hank had thought they could repair the place together—make it some kind of father-son bonding experience. He was good with his hands and Miles liked electrical work. There was no shortage of money from the accident that had put them in this situation though. If they needed to contract something out, that was a possibility. 

“Floor looks like it can be saved,” he continued, glancing at Hank as he made his way to the right. A set of French doors missing most of their glass panes stood open and coated in a film of grey-brown dust that floated in the air like tiny sparks before Hank kicked the door shut. The house rattled and Miles looked around, grimacing as he kicked a sheet up over a couch that was probably in style when his grandmother was a little girl. “Furniture has to go.”

Hank chuckled. “You don’t like that vintage feel, Miles?”

“Sure, I do,” he drawled, flipping it back completely so that Hank could see the full extent of the shaggy, lime green couch that sat on a rose colored rug. Maybe rose. Maybe red—once upon a time. “I just prefer it not be dry-rotted and full of who the fuck even knows.”

Hank pulled a sour face. “Language.”

Miles ignored the comment, moving deeper into the room—to a grand piano in the corner, the white sheet already pulled up over keys that seemed to have shaken the dust from their surfaces. He figured it was the door opening on their arrival that caused it and he ran his fingers over the ivory, pushing down on a few strokes. “It’s in tune,” he exclaimed, surprise lacing his voice while his fingers thumped out a clumsy little song his mother had taught him years ago. Clarissa was the real musician. Miles was just a sidekick, truthfully.

His father reached into the room and pushed a light switch. The power flickered, ancient light bulbs pulsing before sort of wheezing into a dim, grimy yellow light. He laughed, almost apologetically. “We’ll run into town tomorrow and get the energy saver bulbs so we can actually see in here.”

The teenager didn’t answer, just glanced up the stairs and shrugged. “I’m going to check out my bedroom,” he announced rather spontaneously and Hank exhaled loudly.

“Are you sure you want to sleep in the attic, Miles? There are four other bedrooms.”

“I’m used to the attic. I lived in the attic at Mom’s place.”

His father sighed again, defeat written in his every feature. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me. I’m going to order some pizza and look for dishes.”

Miles didn’t respond. That wasn’t odd. Not responding was sort of his ‘thing.’ It had irritated Hank at first, but in the end, he’d grown used to his son’s bizarre behavior. Miles had never been what anyone would have called ‘typical.’ The accident had only made it worse and he’d been determined to give the kid the space he needed to recover, to heal, and to move on in whatever way Miles decided was best for him.

Miles shrugged his black coat off; a bomber style jacket covered in various patches from his old friends, and left it hanging on the rail of the wide, spiraled grand staircase. His footsteps thumped up the steps in rhythm with his heart. He located two bathrooms on his search for the second staircase. He threw open doors, peering into old bedrooms with collapsed beds and faded portraits still hanging on the wall. 

One particular picture stood out to him. It hung next to the doorway that he’d been searching for—a narrow, rickety thing that opened to an even narrower, steep set of worn stairs. It was a large picture, a very early picture from a long, long time ago. The woman wore a flapper style dress in what seemed like silver or white and a net of fine silk and precious stones covered her black hair. She was laughing, an arm slung over the boy standing beside her. They seemed about the same age. He was smoking a cigarette, a hat tilted coquettishly to one side and suspenders pulled up over his shoulders. The watch on his wrist looked particularly expensive to Miles.

For a moment, he wondered who they were. Old occupants, no doubt, but why had this particular picture been left behind when someone else had clearly occupied the house as late as the seventies?

He pulled his sleeve down over the heel of his palm and reached out, scrubbing the filth from their faces. She was beautiful. So was he, in an unreal, almost too good to be true sort of way. They were very clearly related. Same mouth, same cheeky grin. Sister and brother, probably, he assumed. 

Miles stared for a second longer than was necessary and then heaved a sigh, turned to the door, and trudged up the stairs.

The attic was full of boxes; both his and those belong to previous occupants, and was covered in the same film of filth that the rest of the house. He dropped his duffel bag next to where the movers had set up his bed and set to work on finding the box of cleaning products he had packed with his bedroom. He’d anticipated this level of grime in such an old place that had been vacant for, as the realtor told him through cherry lips that stained her teeth, ‘a very, very long time.’

He kicked a few cases around, moving things that were labeled in handwriting he didn’t recognize to one side of the room while he pushed his things to the other. He got to the bottom of a stack of old, rotting cases and stopped, staring down at the old oak floorboards. In the center of the room, right beneath the alcove with the window that he intended to store his books in, was a dark, muddled looking stain that seemed to have soaked into the grain of the wood. Miles made a face; brow furrowed, and crouched closer to it. His fingertips skimmed the edges and he tipped his head. It was bigger than any regular floor stain—so it wasn’t some dumb kid with a cup of purple kool-aid. This covered enough of the floor that it was going to require carpeting to hide it.

“Weird,” he mumbled to himself, rolling his eyes. Whatever the previous owners had gotten up to, it wasn’t his problem. That logical thinking didn’t make him feel any better though, especially when a box from the tower of his things tumbled from the top and spilled open.

Miles jumped, his brain slamming immediately into panic mode. In addition to the box falling, he swore he heard shattering glass and the crack of the surface tension on water breaking as something enormous collided with it. 

He spun to face the noise, eyes wild with anxious terror, before his therapy kicked in and he took a deep, trembling breath. “It’s just a box,” he said out loud, as if hearing it would convince him more. “No glass. No water. Just a stupid, fucking box.” He kicked at it, scowling, and then blinked when he realized what had spilled out of it.

The cleaners. The very ones he’d been looking for unsuccessfully. He’d opened every box though. He’d labeled the one with the cleaning agents specifically so that he could find it with ease when they arrived. He was absolutely certain he hadn’t seen it.

Then again, he was tired. They’d been driving ages.

Maybe he’d missed it.

“Miles!” He could hear Hank calling from the lower level of the house and he knew that if he didn’t answer quickly, the phone in his pocket was going to start buzzing. If he didn’t answer that, he’d hear Hank make the trip up the steps to check on him. “Pizza is here!”

Miles huffed, annoyed with his own fear and still struggling to slow his heart rate. He put his hand against his chest and took one last look at the strange mark on the floor before descending the stairs.


	2. Gideon

Gideon hated being bothered.

It was fortunate then that he rarely was and that the past few decades of his life had been relatively quiet aside from the occasional emboldened teenager sneaking around the ancient, decrepit house in the clearing actively trying to be scared out of his or her wits. Gideon always obliged them, not only because he hated them but because he was frequently bored and often left for years at time to his own devices—wondering the halls of the old house, leaving no evidence of his presence, talking to mice that couldn’t hear or see him (and even if they could, he wasn’t sure they’d care enough to answer.)

He spent most of his time in the living room, sitting upside down with his legs draped over the back of that god-awful lime colored couch that Mrs. Kaminsky had purchased and placed so many, many years ago. That woman had been a lot of things, most of them good, but a decorator had not been among them. She’d tolerated his presence far longer than most people ever had and the two of them had come to a grudging agreement that they would stay out of each other’s way.

And then she’d died.

For a brief moment, Gideon had wondered if she would stick around but he’d stared at her cold corpse for a few days while the skin turned slack and ashen and her tongue started to swell out of her mouth—she never got back up and so he’d sighed with a modicum of disappointment and returned to his usual routines. Stomp around, check the lights, open the doors, close the doors, run the faucets, check the lights, more stomping…

Eventually, her daughter that only sent Christmas cards once a year must have noticed that Mrs. Kaminsky did not send one back. The desiccated, cobweb covered corpse was removed in delicate pieces by a coroner and his team nearly ten months after the final breath had been taken. 

To say that Gideon was disappointed in Mrs. Kaminsky’s daughter was the understatement of the fucking year. He’d stood at the top of the steps, scowling and tapping his foot while the chandelier reacted to his mood by swinging back and forth like a pendulum. Mrs. Kaminsky’s daughter (Gideon had never bothered to learn her name, and why should he—she’d forgotten her own bloody mother) allowed the house to slip into foreclosure. Sometime down the road a “For Sale” sign appeared in the yard, but nobody took the bait. This was the house with the mummified old lady. Nobody was about to touch that.

Then, out of the blue and some forty years later, two idiots showed up in a thunderstorm that rocked the house without Gideon’s aid. To his credit, he had noticed the “For Sale” sign had been removed from the yard when he’d looked out the window the week before but it had been lying in the dirt for so long that he hardly thought it was a premonition of new occupants. Alas, he was incorrect. That alone irritated him. The cheerful disposition of the older man only made it worse and the younger one’s gravitation toward the side of reality that Gideon existed on made the whole situation different than any he’d been in since his…

Well, since he died, to be totally honest. 

He ignored them initially, for the most part. He spooked the kid, Miles, once with a box knocked over in the attic but he had been rather hopeful about the state of the house driving them off. So he watched. He even tried to watch Hank, but found the good doctor to be too full of false joy be tolerable. After all, what was so joyous about hauling old, claw-foot tubs out of an ancient house? He was happy on the outside, but being dead had given Gideon insight that he hadn’t had in life. There was a misery and an ache behind his eyes that lent credence to the idea of a tragedy. Miles wore the same expression openly, as if he’d painted it on his face with the scar on his forehead just below his hairline. 

He tailed Miles while he scrubbed the attic, paying particular attention to the spot on the floor that marked the beginning of Gideon’s prison sentence. He watched him unpack his boxes, rewire the light into a ceiling fan, and drag a large area rug up to the new bedroom. At first, he put it over the mark on the floor and dogmatically avoided looking at it but something kept drawing him back.

It was the same something that Gideon had sensed when the boy appeared. He wasn’t really ‘of the waking world.’ Some part of him…some small, contained little piece…it didn’t fit. It wasn’t living. At some point in Miles’ life, he’d been in Gideon’s world. It may have been brief, but he’d been there and so there was energy to his person that funneled into Gideon. It made him feel alive, more corporeal than usual. He rather liked it, even if he hated the idea of Miles being in the attic—his attic. His space. His death room.

Whatever that sensation in Miles was, it kept pulling him toward that rug in the middle of the room until about a week after they’d been in the house. He rolled it up and shoved it in a corner, standing in the middle of the spot like he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that something wasn’t right.

“What is this?” he breathed, sitting down next to it so that he could rub his fingers on the rough edges of the old wood floorboards. 

Gideon looked down at him. “Blood,” he offered congenially. “But you already know that. You just don’t want to think about it, boy scout.” 

Miles did not respond. Gideon didn’t expect him to. They merely stood there together, one of them unaware of the other’s presence, until Gideon’s cheeks puffed out in mild disappointment. He reached over to the nightstand by the double bed in the middle of the room and shoved the alarm clock off the side without thought. It bounced on the floor, the back opening up so that batteries spilled across the dark staining and skittered under the bed. Miles made a terrible noise, stumbling backward and away from the clock. He landed hard on his backside, breathing heavily, and turned the same color as paste.

In response, Gideon only snorted. “Scare easy, boy scout?”

No response. He’d had hope, really, that they would leave on their own but the more comfortable and inquisitive Miles became, the less patience Gideon had. The ghost pursed his lips and looked up at the fan, which began to rotate faster as the lights grew brighter. Miles was not ignorant to it and he scooted away quickly, wobbling to his feet. His hand clapped over the light switch and slammed it down but the action accomplished nothing and Gideon’s amusement turned into all out laughter.

For a moment, he thought Miles might tough it out. He might have turned out to be another Mrs. Kaminsky who huffed and yelled into the ceiling that she was not going to be harried out of her home by an impatient brat. He looked forward to the challenge—to making this kid piss his pants out of sheer, uncontrollable terror that Miles would fight tooth and nail until the very end…just like Helen Kaminsky.

Instead, Miles made an indignant (albeit frightful) noise in his throat and stormed from the room with a frustrated huff. Gideon heard him take the stairs two at a time, thick-soled boots thumping on the wood. He heard the hesitation at the picture in the hallway and then the thump-thump-thump of the second flight of stairs. 

He flopped back on Miles’ bed, staring up at the fan while the pulsing light became solid and the blades slowed to a regular speed. He hummed under his breath, legs kicking idly until he heard the familiar thumping of Miles coming back up the stairs.

“Well, that was quick,” he mumbled without moving, ignoring the door to the attic swinging open and slamming into the wall.

Miles crackled with irritation. It shown around him in a blur of smoky red lights. That was another quirk of being dead—emotion became color, a sort of pulse that was emitted from human beings that reflected inner turmoil. Some people were easy to pick apart, like Miles, because he was so close to the dead already. Others, like Helen, had been more difficult. There wasn’t much tragedy in her life to make her feel things so profoundly. Not like Miles. Not even like Hank.

Gideon made a grumpy, scandalized sound as Miles climbed onto the bed, stepping right through his sternum with a screwdriver in his hand. He worked mercilessly at the fan, cussing under his breath like the best of sailors (and Gideon knew sailors, he’d served in the First World War) until the whole contraption came free of the ceiling. With a grunt, Miles threw it in the corner. Two of the blades cracked and the motor in the center made a rather unfortunate crunching noise. They both winced at it.

Stepping toward it, Gideon peered into the wreckage. “Don’t think that’s fixable, Mr. Melodrama,” he informed his unknowing companion and Miles simply glared at it.

“Fucking shit electrical work,” the dark-haired boy grumbled to himself and Gideon laughed again.

Electrical work. Cute.

Miles knelt and collected the batteries, tucked them back into the alarm, and flicked the switch several times. None of the lights came on. Nothing even blinked. Frustrated, he smashed the poor thing on the bed until the batteries fell back out onto the comforter. They were the lithium type that he could press his fingers into in order to test strength.

Gideon looked over his shoulder, nosy as ever, as each one came up absolutely dead. There was a long moment of stunned silence. Miles had put them in just a few days earlier. They were both aware of that. Gideon had watched him do it.

“There’s no way…” Miles whispered in the dark, uncomfortable silence of his room.

The ghost reached for the nightstand again and pushed a stack of books off. They scattered over the floor just like the alarm and this time, Miles bolted upright to his feet and took off for the door, saying something that sounded a lot like, ‘oh, fuck this!’ while Gideon chuckled, still standing in the middle of the blood stain on the floor.


	3. Miles

School was exactly the way that Miles had expected it to be: terrible. It hadn’t been half bad in Nevada. He’d never been Mr. Popularity, but he hadn’t been entirely alone either. He had his group of friends, none of which he would have called a ‘best friend’ by any stretch, but they’d been entertaining to each other. He’d felt…typical. At one time, being typical had bothered him. Right about now, with all of the sleepless nights and the absurdly sudden onset of hallucinations, Miles that that typical looked pretty fucking swell.

Cicorella High School (which was apparently pronounced something like Chi-kor-ela, if the teacher escorting him to his first class of the day was to be believed) was pretty basic looking. A squat brown building nestled up the road from the beach with a cracked parking lot and a football field. The American flag and the flag of the state of Connecticut flapped in the rain, which seemed to be the constant weather in Bridgedale, and thunder rumbled from the direction of the ocean. 

Well, Miles told himself that it was thunder. He didn’t want to think about it being a large body of water slapping against the shore.

The floors inside were scuffed linoleum, the lockers were a rather attractive shade of burnt orange that reminded him of Nevada, and the lights were bright enough to promise a headache at the end of the day. He was dropped off without ceremony in a history class and plopped in a desk next to his student guide, a girl with unruly hair the same color as the lockers. “Trevor,” she introduced herself, holding out a small, pale hand that was dotted with the same freckled pattern as the rest of her body. She grinned with white teeth so straight that she had to have just come out of braces and when he didn’t immediately take her hand, she tucked it back against her, unperturbed. “Well, Alison Trevor, but everyone calls me Trevor. You’re Miles Kimberley, right? They gave me your schedule yesterday.”

Miles blinked. Hank hadn’t really done a fabulous job of preparing him to re-enter the real world and to say that anxiety had formed a knot in the pit of his stomach over the past week at the new house was an understatement. That, coupled with obvious exhaustion, made his social skills even more truncated than they usually were. He licked his lips and fumbled awkwardly with the edges of his sleeves, tugging them down so that they covered half of his hands. He did manage a nod, so there was that.

“Shy,” Trevor spoke for him. “It’s cool.” She shrugged and opened a pack of gum, tossing him a cube of it without ever asking him if he actually wanted one. She was wearing overalls like she was still in elementary school, a tank top with printed daisies on it beneath them, and thick, military-issued combat boots. “New places and shit. Takes some getting used to…and this must be a fucking affront to your delicate desert senses.” She gestured to the world outside as Miles put the gum in his mouth. It was a regular bubblegum flavor and the sugar coated his tongue, turning the inside of his mouth sticky sweet.

Trevor was absolutely not put off by his silence. She simply tossed him a copy of a Ralph Ellison book and rolled her eyes. “American literature,” she drawled with a strange, withering accent. “Boring.”

He did snort then. “I read it back home…uh…” It wasn’t home anymore, he realized. Trevor lifted an orange eyebrow and waited for him to explain his stammer. “Back where I used to live.”

“Ah, right,” she agreed. “Gotta watch those semantics lest everyone think we’re in Las Vegas.” She tapped her forehead with a purple pencil that had a lime green eraser and then pointed that very eraser at him. 

Before Miles could fumble through another handful of words, their teacher walked in and commenced with the educating. Miles realized immediately where Trevor’s strange accent had come from. She’d been imitated Mr. Calvin, who drawled on with a thick, southern sound in an ancient voice. She informed him later that Calvin should have retired when her mother was in school at Cicorella, but he just kept showing up for work.

His guide wasn’t bad. She was quirky in a way that would have fit in with his old friends and she was president of the history club, which made sense. Her mother ran the historical society in town, apparently, and according to Trevor ‘nobody’ knew more about Bridgedale than Halley Trevor.

Miles thought that there couldn’t be much to know. It was a sleepy little town with little to offer the tourist industry that boomed along the coast in bigger places. The beach at Bridgedale was rocky and the water wasn’t safe for boats because of the jagged spikes that shot up out of the bay along the uneven bottom. She’d told him something about it—glacial scraping, something something something—he tuned it out halfway through lunch while Trevor arranged her food by color and alphabet. The rest of the history club filed in around them as she spoke, hanging on her every word about some mysterious frozen mammoth that was supposedly trapped in the sand at the bottom of the deepest part of the bay like some prehistoric popsicle.

“Hey, new kid,” one of the boys eventually addressed him. He was a blond with an uneven flop of hair that fell over black glasses and blue eyes. Miles looked up, only moderately surprised that someone had actually addressed him. “Your dad’s the new doctor, isn’t he? Kimberley?”

“Henry, yeah,” Miles answered, pushing hesitantly at the greasy muck that was supposed to pass for pizza. 

The kid—Miles recalled that he’d introduced himself as Preston at some point—nodded almost knowingly, which was moderately irritating. If he’d already known then there was no point in asking the question. He dropped the fork he’d been using to poke at the pizza and raised an eyebrow, waiting for a continuation to the line of questioning. Preston sucked on his chocolate milk and then dropped the carton down, empty. “Oh, my mother owns the practice,” he explained eventually with a flippant wave of his hand. “That’s not the point. She said that you guys bought the old mummy house.”

There was a collective inhale of surprised disbelief from everyone but Trevor, who rolled her eyes. “Ignore them, Miles,” she ordered with a kind of comforting sternness that seemed utterly unnecessary unless there was actually some merit to their surprise. “It’s just a stupid story.”

Preston grinned, clapping his hands excitedly as he settled deeper into his seat, clearly with intentions of telling the story. “So when my mother was a kid,” he began, leaning close to Miles. “This old hag named Helen Kaminsky lived there. Apparently, she got rich off a dead husband and bought the place so she could live out her days in peace.”

“And opulence,” a girl named Georgia pointed out, as if that was important somehow. She even rolled her eyes.

The group narrator hushed her with a glare before swiping blond hair from his glasses. “But she turned into a total hermit when she moved in. My mom said that sometimes she’d stand out in the yard and shake her fist at the house, shouting at it like it could fucking hear her, dude. She went batshit crazy. So much so that her own daughter stopped coming to see her. Eventually, the old broad died and nobody knew for something like ten months. She just rotted in your house, man.”

Miles swallowed hard, staring at him with a long, disconnected expression on his face. Death was not something he dealt with very well. Not anymore. Still, he managed to at least pretend to be normal. “Are you all asking me if the house is haunted?”

Georgia nodded, thick brown braids bouncing down her back as she did. Preston only stared with open, rapt interest.

Miles picked up his pizza, bit into the tasteless garbage, chewed, and swallowed before dropping it back onto the plate. Then he brushed his hands off on his sides. “Nope. House is totally normal. Old, dusty, full of terribly outdated furniture, but normal.”

Preston huffed. Georgia nudged him. “I told you,” she said, nose up in the air. “If anyone’s haunting that place, it would be Gi—“

“Shut up,” Trevor snarled suddenly. “You’re going to freak him out if you start talking about the place like it’s some death trap. It’s a house. Leave it.”

Georgia and Preston both shrugged and Preston picked up his lunch pack, shouldering it. “Whatever.” He held a hand a fist out and Miles awkwardly pressed his knuckles to it. “See you around, Kimberley.” His eyes turned stonily to Trevor. “Alison.” The girl just wrinkled her nose like Preston had shoved something offensive under it.

Miles turned his attention to Trevor and she made a big deal of sighing and rolling her eyes. “Ignore them,” she repeated. 

“What was she saying?”

For a moment, it seemed like Trevor wasn’t going to say anything but the urge to spout more local history seemed like something she was unable to deny and Miles shifted in his seat, keenly aware of how uncomfortable she was making this. “Look, Miles,” she began. “I don’t know the big details on it but my mom teaches a class on local history on the weekends. It’s at the library. She’ll know all about your house if you’re curious. It just…it has a sordid history. I’m sure your dad knew that when he bought it. That’s why it was on the market so long.”

“An old lady rotted in it. That’s not exactly the ax murders of New Orleans, Trev. I’m new here, not stupid.”

Trevor flopped forward, her arms extended on the plastic table. Then she leaned back, fiddled with the straps of her overalls, and heaved another dramatic sigh. He was tempted to tell her to go out for the school play—she had the melodrama down already. Instead, he bit his tongue and waited. Trevor cleared her throat. “We call it the Cicorella House. Some bootlegger bought it in the early nineteen hundreds. When he died, his son, Gideon Cicorella, inherited the place and all the money.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “But nobody knows what happened to him. He disappeared. Vanished. So did all of his personal belongings. Like he never existed at all, aside from the few pictures the historical society has of him.”

“Do you have any of those pictures?”

She blinked at him, clearly put off by the sudden interest. “Why?”

Miles licked his lips. “There’s a picture in the house. I just…it’s the right age. Do you have one or not?”

Trevor took the answer at face value and reached into the corduroy sack she carried with her. It was fashioned like a rabbit with a floppy head and ears on top and four limbs sticking out of the sides. She unzipped the belly and took out a tablet, slinging the entire thing onto the table as she unlocked it and opened a particular file. “I help my mom with some of the stuff at the historical society,” she explained vaguely. “So let’s see. Gideon Cicorella. He was a renowned hedonist. Really into himself, or so the accounts say. I only took an interest because…well…” She chuckled and opened a particular thumbnail. “Just take a look at him. You’ll understand.”

The photographs were in color, unlike the one on his wall, but the resemblance was striking. “That’s him,” Miles mumbled thickly. “That’s the kid on my wall.”

“You have a picture of Gideon Cicorella?”

There was no mistaking it. It was the same cheeky grin, the same mop of hair so dark that it looked like ink, and hazel eyes—a deep, verdant green and caramel brown. He was leaning against a car that probably cost more than Miles’ house in Vegas and the same woman from the picture at the house was standing next to him, looking up with a wide, cheerful smile on her face. One of her arms was wrapped around the waist of a man that was about Gideon’s equal in height—which was tall, from what Miles could see—but with broader shoulders, gold-blond hair, and warm, chocolate brown eyes. “Yeah,” he answered vacantly. “Who is she?”

Trevor peered over his shoulder. “Gideon’s sister, Ava. A few years after he went missing, he was declared dead and she got everything. There are…rumors. The man next to her is Emmett Rosslyn. She was supposed to marry him but he took off for the west coast not long after Gideon vanished. You should really get all the dirty details from my mother. She’s kind of a fangirl.”

“So are you, it would seem.”

“Just for him,” she replied, taking an almost mocking, dreamy tone when she spoke. “I mean, look at him. What a tragedy that someone so beautiful was just…stolen.”

“He went missing. You don’t know what happened.”

She snorted. “Tell that to my mother. She thinks Ava killed him for the money and Rosslyn knew so he took off to avoid being brought in for it.”

Miles raised an eyebrow. “That’s it? That’s her conspiracy theory? I don’t mean to be an asshole, Trevor, but there are some big plot holes there.”

Trevor laughed and the bell rang, signaling the timer to get back to class. “There’s more,” she assured him. “She’ll tell you all of it if you come to that class, compatriot. Then she’ll want to visit your house so she can see this picture you have of him.”


	4. Gideon

Gideon watched from a seat on the steps up to the attic while Miles trudged up to the second floor, slung his backpack on the ground, and stopped in front of the picture. It caught the ghost’s interest and Gideon’s head tilted curiously to one side while Miles stared up at the massive photograph. He wondered (with vague disinterest) how much his sister had paid to have the damn thing installed.

For a long, quiet minute they both just stared. Miles at a picture of Gideon from something like a century before and Gideon at Miles, eyes narrowed, concentration zeroed in on his face. “Where did you go?” Miles whispered, reaching forward and running his fingers over the freshly cleaned glass that covered the faces of the Cicorella siblings. It was a bizarre moment and Gideon wasn’t entirely sure what he thought about it. He was sure that he didn’t like the idea of Miles snooping around his life.

“Bridgedale Cemetery, boy scout,” he told him, not that Miles could hear. The dumb kid only shouldered his backpack and headed back up to his room, his brows drawn together in moody concentration.

Miles had a tragic look to him. Well, Gideon thought so, at least. His face was kind of peaked, like he’d recently lost weight that he couldn’t afford to lose and it made his eyes look oddly big for his thin face. His cheekbones were rounded and made to appear more angular without any fat to fill them out but Gideon assumed that after a few pizzas, the kid might have a bit of a baby face. He had a curly mop of chestnut hair on his head, cut short at the sides and longer at the top so it sort of flopped one way in a cute mess that Miles was always running his fingers through. He even made grumpy, puffing noises when they got stuck in tangles.

He looked tired that day, but that was likely because Gideon was still entertaining himself by fucking with him. He flicked the lights on and off, knocked books off of his desk, ran up and down the steps in the middle of the night, and jerked the blankets from Miles’ body. 

Although, it’s likely pertinent to note that he felt bad about that last one when the dumb kid didn’t wake up and only shivered like the delicate desert flower that he was. So he’d put the blanket back on him and sulked in the corner, upset at his ruined fun.

He sat on Miles’ bed while Miles stepped over to his desk and opened the slim, metal box that he had once referred to as “The Laptop.” Gideon liked “The Laptop.” It played music when Miles was home, though he couldn’t figure out how to play the music himself because it required Miles’ thumbprint to even activate it or whatever. It was the first thing he did when he got home—flipped it open and started some folksy ‘man and a guitar’ type of music while he scratched away at his homework.

“Studious little bastard, aren’t you?” Gideon drawled, getting up from the bed to lean against the desk while Miles worked on some complex looking equation. The ghost had never really bothered with school. He’d been too busy having fun, throwing parties, attending social events, meeting people—networking, they called it now. ‘Networking’…like knowing who was dipping it in whatshisface’s wife was some kind of fancy career skill…like the concept was fucking new. Gideon had been memorizing who was banging who while he did lines of coke off of a dancer’s tits in his teenage years. Needless to say, he’d been a very different than Miles, though it wasn’t all a desire to party. Some of it was a desire to forget—to forget his father, forget the war and that first little German kid with his wide, clear blue eyes staring up at him in that wet, dank trench just before Gideon shoved a pistol in his gut and pulled the trigger…

He pushed the memory from his head. That kid was long gone. Gideon was long gone. None of the guilt mattered anymore, not that it ever really had. Feeling bad about things never fucking changed them. It only changed the person that felt bad and Gideon really wasn’t capable of change anymore. His days of long, philosophical thoughts and arguments with himself were dead and buried with his corpse in Bridgedale.

Miles finished his math problem and reached into the drawer of his desk as Gideon rattled his cup of pens. The boy’s jaw clenched and he opened a handful of pill bottles, carefully removing one tiny dose from each orange tube. He tossed them back with a bottle of water and turned from the room, leaving ‘The Laptop’ open and playing and the bottles in clear view.

Gideon sat down in the chair, still warm from Miles’ presence, and looked at the bottles. Then he looked at Laptop.

Then back at the bottles.

He’d watched Miles at this for a week and though he’d never been a scholar, he liked to consider himself intelligent. He did enjoy reading, learning, academic endeavors…just on his own time.

“Respiradone and Sertraline,” he read to himself. He was about ready to type the letters into the little white bar when he heard Miles coming back up the stairs. Gideon put the bottle back, stood up, and watched as the kid inhaled two slices of pizza (seriously, it seemed like it was all Miles was willing to eat) and then collapsed onto the bed to stare at the ceiling.

The music kept playing and Miles kept staring, even when Gideon flickered the lights. He only rubbed his eyes and shook his head, mumbling something about a doctor and increasing the respira-whatever. He pulled a pillow over his face and huffed into it while Gideon dragged his feet across the floor, delighting in the way the hard soles of his shoes scraped against the wood and made Miles shudder. The teenager eventually got up, snatching what Gideon had identified as a phone that was somehow not connected to a wall. Then he plugged a set of white things into it and shoved them into his ears. The same music from Laptop began to play loudly—so loudly that Gideon could hear it through the little buds in Miles’ ears. He kept the pillow over his face when he flopped back down.

It was quite clear to Gideon that Miles was attempting to drown him out and so he made a show of dramatically shoving at the bed until the frame shook and Miles curled up on his side, his knuckles white around the pillow. When he garnered no reaction beyond a glazed, clearly drugged glance from beyond the edge of the pillow, he stopped. Moments later, Miles fell asleep.

When he’d done this to Kaminsky, she’d spent the entire night pacing and anxious. She’d searched the entire house for an intruder. She called the police. She searched again. She didn’t sleep a moment. The occupants before Kaminsky had been so utterly horrified by the ‘heavy atmosphere’ of the house that none of them had ever stayed more than a few months. Miles and Hank were intent on toughing it out, it seemed. That was normal though. Gideon knew this drill by now. Always pick a target and single them out, drive them crazy so that there’s a split within the house, and then push at the split until the occupants have to leave each other or leave the house.

Gideon picked Miles. Instead of the belief that there was someone living in the walls (which had been Helen Kaminsky’s belief, at one point) Miles just seemed to think that he was slowly slipping into madness.

Bored with his sleeping target, Gideon made his way downstairs as night fell and sank into the bench at the piano. Aside from the picture, the instrument was the only piece of furniture left in the home that had once belonged to him. He took care of it. He cleaned it, tuned it, and played it. There was an emotional attachment there—something old and nostalgic that reminded him of days when he and Ava had held parties at the big house in the clearing, with lanterns on the porch and the pool full and lit up. 

Shit, even the pool was gone.

It reminded him of his sister in her dancing dress and hard leather shoes tapping against the wood, giggling and laughing and swinging around the room on the arm of some wealthy socialite or Emmett Rosslyn.

For a long time, he stared down at the keys. Miles had a sister. Her picture was on the mirror above his dresser. Every morning when the kid woke up, he took it down, pressed his fingers to her smiling face, and said, “Good morning, Clair.”

After he’d died, his sister had stood in front of that picture in the hall every night to look at him. Then she’d leaned forward on her toes, kissed the glass, and said, “Goodnight, Gideon.”

There shouldn’t have been any guilt over taunting Miles, but there was. There shouldn’t have been any parallels between the two of them. They didn’t look alike, they didn’t share personality traits. It was just that one thing that grated on Gideon’s nerves and made him want to run as far as he could and scream for Ava to come back, to scream at her for ever leaving because why hadn’t she stayed with him? She’d died in the house. In the end, she’d known he was there and she’d apologized for God only knows what—outliving him, probably—and then she’d taken that last rattling breath as cancer ravaged her chest before she even turned forty.

Gideon snarled, moody and frustrated and somehow tired, despite the fact that he didn’t sleep. He couldn’t sleep. You had to be real to become physically exhausted and it was easy to debate that he wasn’t real. Miles had that argument down already. It was simple to claim insanity.

With wooden fingers, Gideon moved his hands over the keys, thumping out an old nursery rhyme that his sister used to sing when they were children braiding daisies in the front yard…all while their father played Criminal King in the parlor.

He hummed along with it at first, only absent-mindedly breaking into song during the verse when Clementine drowns and the singer can’t reach her because he can’t swim. In his intense self-loathing and miserable pity party, he managed to miss the sound of footsteps on the stairs until movement caught his eye.

His fingers froze and he whipped around, expecting a terrified Miles to be practically pissing his pants.

Instead, a set of large, horror-struck blue eyes locked onto his.

Like Miles could see him. The kid was somewhere halfway between asleep and awake, wearing nothing but loose linen pajama bottoms, but he was looking right at him.

Right. Fucking. At. Him.

“You,” he breathed. “You’re…that…you…” He stammered, taking a step back when Gideon stood up. His arm flailed blindly toward the hall upstairs like he was trying to indicate the picture. Miles blinked wildly, caught like a deer in headlights.

The ghost tipped his head curiously. “Gideon,” he offered.

It was at that point that the terror really hit Miles. “HANK!” He took off, tripping up the stairs in the process, screaming for his father like…well, like he’d seen a ghost.


	5. Miles

Miles wondered out of the doctor’s office with deep, dark circles under his eyes and a slight shake to his hands that hadn’t been there before the move to the east coast. His new doctor assured him that it was just the move—things would plateau and he’d be fine. It was an old house, things made noise…it was all explainable. It was all okay. Hank had only agreed, still wearing his white coat and watching with a concerned look on his face while his colleague squinted over Miles’ medical files like they were some kind of very interesting book.

Normal chemical levels, he’d said. Blood work was fantastic. It was likely just an adjustment to the environment. 

They switched his meds, patted him on the head, and reminded him to keep attending the therapy that he had stopped attending months before he’d even left Vegas. Hank had given a grim stare at that, but he’d kept his mouth shut and Miles was allowed to trundle out of the office on a brisk Saturday afternoon with a prescription clutched in his fist and a set of car keys in his pocket. He didn’t particularly like driving. In fact, he hated it, and in Vegas he’d been able to walk almost everywhere but in Bridgedale, that was not a possibility. So he’d been given an additional anti-anxiety medication to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder that was left over from the accident that ruined his life.

He settled into the car and cast himself a withering glance in the mirror. He looked like shit. He could give Hank that assessment (which he had made over breakfast that morning while Miles stared vacantly into a bowl of Lucky Charms). His eyes were dull, his hair was a mess, and he was paler than usual. ‘Exhausted’ was an accurate description, even if Hank’s ‘shit’ was far more colorful. 

Exhaling and turning his attention to the wheel in front of him, Miles considered going back to the house but that haunting, horrifying night three days ago just kept coming back. He’d woken up to the sound of the piano and in his dazed state of mind, got it stuck in his head that his sister was there. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d hallucinated Clarissa. He’d toddled down the stairs, bleary eyed and sleepy, intent on confronting this phantom and forcing himself to understand that it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. Instead, the closer he’d gotten, the more he’d come to realize that the voice humming along and then singing along was not his sister. It was not even female. It was a low tenor, husky and unfamiliar, with an almost velvety smoke-like sound laced into the voice.

It was the type of voice he could have listened to all day and not gotten bored with.

That alone should have frightened but Miles had continued until he found himself at the piano, staring at the shimmery, translucent…thing…sitting at the instrument. When it pushed the keys, the keys moved but there was no way it was corporeal. It looked almost foggy, like a poorly taken picture or an oil painting smudged with water. There was nothing below the knee, just empty space where there should have been a continued line of black trousers. 

He recognized the suspenders, one lazily down around a hip and the other stretched over a shoulder, a cigarette tucked behind the ear and a mop of black hair that looked more like silk than anything else. 

He knew what—who—he was looking at. The same likeness graced the picture in the hallway—the picture that, try as he might, Miles could not pull off of the wall. It was almost like the frame was built into the house.

The wraith at the piano was not Clarissa. It was Gideon Cicorella.

And Gideon had looked right at him. His face was clear compared to the rest of his body, with defined features that boasted obviously careful breeding among the upper class of wherever he was from—going off of the last name only, Miles would have guessed Italy, but Gideon looked the part and so did his sister in the picture. Dark hair, a Mediterranean skin tone just short of being dark enough to call ‘olive’ but still a sun-kissed bronze, and sharp, defined features—full lips, big eyes, impossibly long eyelashes that seemed to touch his cheeks when he blinked at him, surprised that he was even being looked at.

To call the breakdown that followed the episode a ‘fit’ was the understatement of the goddamn century. Miles had gone screaming to Hank, frantically throwing himself into his father’s bed like he was a five-year-old again, hysterically crying about hallucinations, his bed shaking, blood on the floor, and some long dead kid from the age of prohibition. 

That had landed him here, at the doctor’s office, on a Saturday. It also meant that he wasn’t keen on going back to the house to face more bizarre hallucinations. He would acclimate while his father was home, thank you very much, and he would find something else to do in the meantime.

Miles heaved a sigh and guided the car toward the sleepy town of Bridgedale, meandering through the streets in an effort to familiarize himself with his new environment. The sign for Bridgedale Community Library stuck out, as did the chaotic cloud of orange hair that bobbed around the parking lot. Breathing with a liberal sense of relief, Miles guided the car into the lot and parked just beyond where Trevor was stumbling around with her nose in a book, evidently trying to walk and read at the same time.

“Hey, carrot top,” he called, snapping the door shut. Trevor clapped her book shut, eyes narrowed in preparation for defense, and looked around. When her eyes landed on him, her irritation melted away and she grinned.

“You came! The class is finished up but Mom’s still inside,” she greeted, jogging to where he was standing in his black coat, sunglasses low over his eyes in an attempt to disguise how tired he was. He hadn’t actually come for whatever historical information Halley Trevor could offer, but there was something nagging him about what he’d seen in the living room. Something that didn’t quite fit. His other hallucinations had been…decidedly real. They’d been solid and they’d been people he knew. He didn’t know anything about some dead kid from a century before, other than the picture in the house.

Trevor slung an arm over his shoulders and they awkwardly bumbled into the library. Miles tripped over his high tops more than once and Trevor got her floral printed skirt caught in the zipper of his jacket. It was far too large for her and far too fluffy to really be casual wear. However, in the week that he’d known her, he had come to understand that eccentricity was just one of Trevor’s quirks and you had to live with it if you were going to be on good terms with her. He was rather fond of it, anyway. She took no shit from anyone and was prepared to knock someone squarely in the nose if they made a comment about her.

Her mother was a history buff, she’d explained. But her father was a cop.

The red head led them into a dimly lit back classroom full of file towers from the floor to the ceiling along the walls, aside from one square that made room for a projector screen. The project, sat in the middle of a square of tables, was displaying an ancient picture of the “Welcome to Bridgedale” sign at the start of the road into town. Hunched over one of the tables was a woman with red hair as wild as Trevor’s, a pair of glasses the size of half of her face, and enough jewelry on to make a pawn shop jealous.

“Mama,” Trevor sing-songed, traipsing into the room and batting her eyelashes as her mother looked up. The glasses made her eyes look like she was part lemur. She pushed them up her nose.

“Alison,” she answered slowly, glancing between the two of them. It was clear that she was expecting them to ask her for something.

Trevor only smiled even more sweetly, layering on the sugar like perhaps she’d done something wrong earlier in the day and was on the outs with Halley. “This is Miles Kimberley. I told you about him. He lives in The Cicorella House.”

The change in the atmosphere was immediate and almost overwhelming. Halley broke into a smile that changed her whole face from introverted geek to magazine cover beautiful. She dropped the pen in her hand quickly, ignoring the ink on her fingers, and then clapped her palms together in excitement. “Oh, I am so happy you came!” she practically squealed, nearly hopping around the table so she could throw her arms around Miles.

It was definitely a mother hug. It was tight, but not in a way that was suffocating, and Halley rubbed his back while she embraced him, despite Miles’ startled, wide-eyed expression and lack of motion. 

The woman composed herself and leaned back with a slight cough to clear her throat. “Sorry,” she mumbled and Miles shook his head. “Not many people share my passion in local history. I’m always excited to share.”

Trevor glanced at him over her mother’s shoulders and shrugged, rolling her eyes and putting her finger next to her head. She twirled it around like she was indicating to him that perhaps her mother was crazy and Miles was staring to agree with that impression as Halley set him down at one of the tables. She went back to where she’d been when they walked in and pulled a large bag from beneath the desk. She dragged it toward him and then slung it on top of the table near his elbow. The bag hit the surface with a loud thump and both Miles and Trevor jumped. In Miles’ case, he also leaned back while Halley, having not noticed or having chose to ignore their reactions, produced an album from the depths of her very heavy brocade bag. It was frayed around the edges, clearly well-used, and printed with large red flowers. 

The album, however, was immaculate.

And on the cover was a photo of a very, very Italian looking man with two young children standing in front of him. They seemed to be the same age, or at least very close, and they were crowded close to each other and holding hands. The man had one large, meaty fist clasped around the boy’s shoulder in a white-knuckled grasp.

“This is Giancarlo Cicorella, shortly after his wife died,” Halley explained, pointing to the picture. “And these are his children. Gideon Cristiano.” Her finger slid down the picture to the boy and then over to the girl. “And Ava Maria. They’re eleven months apart. Nearly twins.”

Miles swallowed hard. He had to force himself to look down at the picture of a sullen, scowling Gideon clinging to his vacant looking sister. None of the joy that was visible in the picture of them that he possessed was evident. Something was…off. Trevor said it for him. “Dad looks like an asshole.”

Halley frowned. “There are conflicting reports about Giancarlo. He loved his children. Spoiled them rotten…but he was…harsh. And very involved in organized crime. The staff at the house never stayed very long. They called Giancarlo taciturn, difficult, insulting, and often abusive. When prohibition started, he began bootlegging and importing liquor from Ireland. He had a crew of boys that would take a boat just off the coast, load it up from a freighter from Ireland that would go back up to Canada to refuel and then leave without ever touching American soil. To say he made millions would be understating his level of success. By a modern standard, Giancarlo made billions.”

“And then he died,” Miles said stiffly.

The older woman sighed and turned the page to a picture of an older Gideon in a military uniform. “The war broke out. Gideon served. Ava stayed behind. She wanted to be a dancer.” The picture on the opposite page was Ava in another flapper dress, dancing the Charleston with a group of other girls in the same garb. “Giancarlo didn’t agree and arranged for her to meet Emmett Rosslyn. He wanted them to marry. Before he could solidify the arrangement, a rival bootlegger put a bullet between his eyes. His estate was left to Gideon.”

The page turned again and there were pages and pages of financial records, deeds, newspaper articles, and a photograph of Ava crying at what looked like a funeral. Gideon was not present. Instead, there was that strapping blond from the photograph that Trevor had. Miles pointed to him. “Rosslyn?”

Halley nodded. “By all accounts, Emmett Rosslyn fell head over heels in love with Ava Maria Cicorella. They were the talk of every social newspaper. Locals called them American Sweethearts. She was beautiful. He was handsome. They adored each other.” There were several more pages, most of them featuring Emmett and Ava holding hands, dancing, or just staring at one another for some photo op. “The only problem was that she was broke.”

Miles looked up, brow furrowed. “What?”

“Daddy left all his money to his boy,” Trevor drawled. “Typical.”

Halley pointed out a particular record—a will—and explained. “Ava received a stipend to be controlled by her brother. When Gideon back, he threw out the idea and gave Ava full access to the family’s mountains of wealth. To say that the Cicorella kids were close is an understatement. I suspect, given what their father was like and the lack of their mother’s presence, Gideon was all Ava ever had and he felt the same way about her. He was, according to reports, pleased with her marriage arrangement to Rosslyn. He would be able to support the lifestyle Ava was used to and he treated the girl like she was glass. Except….”

She pursed her lips, turning the page to a photograph of Gideon and Emmett in what was obviously a very expensive, very fast car for the time. “Gideon and Emmett became…very close. Almost inappropriately close.”

Miles lifted an eyebrow. “You’re saying Giancarlo’s kid was gay?”

She shook her head, tossing her mane of orange hair over her shoulder as her ink stained fingers cruised the page. “I’m not saying anything. Gideon Cicorella is long dead now. I can’t assume what his sexual orientation was but there were rumors about Rosslyn already. You have to dig deep to find them. He buried them with wealth, but they exist. On November 14th, 1929, Gideon Cicorella was seen getting into this car…”

Halley flipped the page to a crime scene photograph with clear police markers all over it. It was a sleek, black vehicle with a pack of cigarettes on the passenger’s seat. “He was with Emmett. He took him to the train station. Emmett boarded a train with a single suitcase and went to California. He never came back. He hired a lawyer to sell off all of his estates in the east except for one penthouse in Hartford that his son still owns.”

“His son?”

She grinned. “His son. Gideon Rosslyn.”

Miles stared, something like obscene horror creeping up his throat. “Oh my god.”

Trevor’s mother licked her lips. “It gets better. Gideon drove the car back to the house that you now live at. He went inside and spoke to his sister. She claims that he went upstairs to bed. She never saw him again. When she woke up, all of his personal items were gone and so was he. So was this car.” She returned to the picture of Gideon and Emmett together and the yellow car, not the black one. “This car—“ she repeated. “Was found at the bottom of the lake west of your house with nothing in it twenty years after Gideon disappeared.”

“What happened to him?” Trevor asked, leaning forward, clearly enthralled by a story she had to have heard thirty times.

Miles was still staring down at the laughing picture of the specter he’d seen in the house, sitting at the piano, with the same sad eyes that his smile never reached…except in that picture with Emmett.

Halley finally sat down instead of continuing to leer over his shoulder at her compilation of Gideon’s history. “Nobody knows, Miles. They never found his body. They declared him dead four years after he disappeared. Emmett never came back to marry Ava. In fact, Ava never married. She spent her life sinking her fortune into philanthropic ventures. She built the school you attend. She built this library. She built a safe house in Hartford for at risk youth—that was unheard of in her time, you know. She became an activist, always using her money to give a voice to the voiceless.”

“You think she felt guilty.”

For a moment, there was silence and then Halley chewed her lip. “I think that Ava found out something about Emmett and Gideon that neither of the boys wanted her to know. I think she was angry, rightfully so. I think she was jealous. I think Gideon took Emmett out of Bridgedale and sent him away to keep him from her and I think Ava, in a blind fury, murdered her brother. I think his body is buried on your property or at the bottom of that lake…and I think she spent the rest of her life trying to make up for what she did.”

“She’s dead, obviously.”

“She died young. Lung cancer. She died in the master bedroom. She left all of her money to that safe house in Hartford. After her, the house had a string of occupants that never stayed more than a few months. Then Helen Kaminsky moved in. She became a recluse, always ranting and raving about the house having a life of its own when people did manage to speak to her. She died there, in the living room. Nobody that lives in that house ever stays, Miles.”

Miles kept staring down at the picture. “Can I…borrow this?” he eventually asked. “I just…” He thumbed the picture of Gideon and Emmett again. “What a fucking shame. How old was he?”

“Twenty-six when he disappeared.”

“Jesus,” Trevor whispered. “Survive the fucking Germans in World War I only to come home and have your kid sister sink you to the bottom of a fucking lake. What luck.”

Halley pushed the album closer. “Have at it. I have a request though…”

Miles looked up, raised an eyebrow, and waited.

“I want to see that picture you have of them.”

“Done.”


	6. Gideon

Gideon languished in the alcove of the attic, reclined against one wall with a leg dangling from the seat, swinging lazily back and forth. He smoked the cigarette behind his ear, confident that it would return in a few moments. It always did and the action of smoking it alleviated some of the boredom. He blinked at the mirror above the dresser—at Clarissa Kimberley, who looked very much like a much more feminine version of Miles. She was impish and grinning widely, wearing wide earrings that stretched her earlobes so that he was certain he could have put his index finger through the holes. Her makeup was severe—winged eyeliner and smoky shadow around stormy grey eyes. There were toxic blue streaks in her dark hair and she was holding a beer, one arm slung around a man that was looking down at her, his face obscured by the angle. If Gideon had to guess, he would have said boyfriend.

She was pretty, in a wildly unfamiliar sort of way. He supposed it was a sign of changing times, but given that he couldn’t go any further than the lake a mile or two to the west and then the same distance in the other directions, he didn’t really know what the world was like. He could only guess from what he saw on the television hanging in the living room when Hank watched CNN at night while he looked over medical files or stared vacantly at a picture of Clarissa in his wallet. 

Gideon had gathered that Clarissa was dead. It was the only explanation for the ashen look on Hank’s face when he saw her photograph. He carried it anyway, despite the ache it obviously caused, and Gideon commended him for that. Giancarlo would not have done the same for either of his children—he had been a very stern believer in ‘putting your boots back on’ and moving forward. Crying had been a punishable offense in the Cicorella house, but he’d seen Hank cry openly over a childhood picture of Miles and Clarissa that was in his office. He never let Miles see though. Another commendable trait.

Heaving a sigh, Gideon pushed himself up. Miles was back at school. He had been for something like three days and since that night at the piano, he had adamantly refused to notice anything in the house and truth be told, Gideon was not actively trying to frighten him anymore. He’d been so startled by the eye contact that any desire to drive the teenager and his father out of the house had dissolved. The last person to have seen him was Ava, just before she died, and that had been because she’d been minutes from breathing her last breath. She’d seen him at the bottom of her bed, watching her curiously. She’d tried to push her frail body up off the mattress, rasping his name in voice ravaged by cancer that he no longer recognized as his little sister’s.

God have mercy, I knew it was you.

It was a curious set of words to be her final phrase, but that was the way the cards had fallen. He’d had hope that she would stick around, but she never did show up. The nurses simply removed her body the next day, a lawyer emptied the house, and that was the end of Ava Maria.

The ghost made his way slowly down the stairs. Hank was asleep, face down, on the couch. His arm hung off the side, the remote to the television button-side down beside his limp fingers. He was breathing heavily, glasses still on his face, and Gideon grumbled before carefully removing them and setting them on the table.

He’d decided, after watching Hank sob silently over his dead daughter, that he rather liked the man. Or perhaps it was pity. It didn’t matter. He had no ill intentions toward Dr. Kimberley anymore.

The door swung open quietly a minute later. Miles was always quiet when his father was off for the day. Hank worked long, laborious hours and Miles seemed to appreciate his father, even if he didn’t seem to particularly love him. There was something off there. Something that wasn’t quite…what it should have been. Miles was always anxious around Hank, radiating a pale, grayish glow that sort of vibrated around his body. He did his best to avoid the man without alerting Hank to the actual avoidance. It was an elaborate dance that stoked Gideon’s curiousity.

The teenager stopped dead in his tracks, staring into the living room with wide, terror-stricken eyes that locked on Gideon’s again. For a moment, they just stared at each other and then Miles carefully set the car keys down on the table by the door, reached into his pocket, and withdrew a pill bottle. He popped one of the capsules into his mouth and swallowed without water, still staring at the ghost standing over his father.

“Miles,” Gideon greeted.

“You’re not real,” the teenager whispered to himself and then he shook his rain-dampened head, as if shaking the image of Gideon from the back of his eyes. He took the stairs two at a time while Gideon followed silently until they stopped at the attic.

Miles couldn’t always see him. Sometimes, Gideon could stand in front of his face and scream and the kid didn’t react. By the time they reached the attic, he seemed not to notice him anymore and so Gideon resumed his position in the alcove with the built in bench. 

Blue eyes scanned the room nervously. Miles was still anxious, fumbling with the strap of his bag before he allowed it to slide to the floor. “It’s getting worse,” he told himself sternly. “Hank says that normal. It can get worse before it gets better. It’s normal. It’s not real. He’s not real. He’s dead. He’s been dead for a century.”

“No kidding, boy scout,” Gideon drawled but Miles didn’t react. He just reached into his bag and sat down in the middle of the dark stain on the floor, withdrawing a pale album that immediately caught his ghostly companion’s attention. He recognized the photograph as one taken just a few hours after his mother’s funeral. “Hey, that’s mine! Where did you get that?” 

Intrigued, he slid from his seat and crossed the room, sinking onto the floor in the middle of that god-forsaken spot where Miles had opened the album. His sister and his father stared up at him—he recognized Giancarlo’s dark features and stern, emotionless expression with that bloody fat cigar sticking out of the corner of his sullen mouth. Ava was dancing, laughing and pointing at someone in the crowd of people gathered around her and her friends. Their father had never approved of Ava’s aspirations, but she’d loved it anyway. She’d loved it despite his verbal tirades every time she danced, the physical altercations that put her brother between the two of them because Gideon was certain that he could take a beating from Giancarlo but Ava definitely couldn’t.

Miles ground his teeth, eyes narrowed, and flipped the page.

To the car. To Emmett Rosslyn and the face looking up at him was so jarring and so unexpected that Gideon flinched away from it at first, drawn rapidly into a memory from just after his return from Europe.

“You can just be you here, Gids. No expectations, no Ava, no outside world. Just you and me.” Emmett’s blue eyes, the color of the summer sky and flecked with a gray so soft that the spots looked like tiny clouds and soft, golden blond hair—the scrape of stubble on his jaw when Emmett pressed their cheeks together.

The sensation of his heart lurching in his chest was bizarre, given that he didn’t actually have a heart in his chest. The heartbreak was there all over again though—frantic, desperate nights at the beach in the back of Gideon’s car and days spent languishing in Emmett’s penthouse, sprawled in bed together while Ava was dancing somewhere out west.

If he’d been able to vomit, he probably would have. Instead, he just pitched forward so that his hands planted on either side of the album. The lights in the room flickered with his mood, desperate and distraught, and the clawing in his throat ached the way it had when he was a child hiding under the table, trying his best not to let the tears spill over his cheeks. “Emmett,” he breathed a name he hadn’t spoken in almost a century and stared down at Emmett’s smiling face. “Jesus Christ, you must be dead now. Oh my god.”

Miles looked around the room and lifted his pill bottle again, swallowing another and then another and then another, wincing at the way the desk rattled, the windows shook, and the lights blinked in a frantic, manic pattern that matched Gideon’s mood perfectly.

He’d blocked Emmett out. He’d been so desperate to forget that he’d erased Ava’s would-be husband completely, but it all came back then. The war, the steadily growing knot in his stomach when he realized that his sexual attractions were not limited to females, and how avidly he’d hid it—how he’d gone so far into the closet that he’d been in fucking Narnia…until Emmett Rosslyn showed up in his life.

Desperately, Miles attempted to turn the page and Gideon’s hand slammed down on the album with a resounding ‘crack’ of skin on lamination. The teenager jumped backward and Gideon looked up as the color drained from Miles’ face. His cheeks went paste-white and his eyes welled up. “I can’t do this,” the kid whimpered. “God, I can’t do this. I’m sorry!” He lifted the orange bottle to his lips and for a brief, flickering moment, Gideon realized what his intention was and he froze.

It would have been nice to have a companion.

But anger won out. Anger at the situation, at the realization that he’d forgotten the one person in the world that had ever loved him just for being himself—not for his money or how he looked or because he was the only other man open to fucking around with his own goddamn gender. It hadn’t been like any of that with Emmett. It had been real and raw and beautiful.

And it was gone. Just like Gideon was gone. Like Ava was gone. 

Just like Emmett Rosslyn was gone.

Miles was on his way to gone, orange bottle at his lips, held tightly by a trembling hand before Gideon felt something snap in his chest. His hand darted forward and he slapped the bottle away. It hit the floor, capsules flying across the boards, spinning and skipping blue dots in a horrifying arch of potential suicide.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he snarled and when Miles looked up, he knew that he could see him. He knew, without a doubt, that Miles knew that this was real…that it had to be real. “Is this what you want? To be fucking stuck here like me? To stay behind and watch everyone you care about die and fucking disappear? Are you stupid, boy scout, or are you that goddamn pathetic?”

“You’re not real,” Miles whispered, trembling and staring with horrified, red-rimmed eyes that were bloodshot from the corners to the irises. “You can’t be real. I’m just sick. I’m just sick again and Hank will send me away and I’ll come back okay just like last time. It’ll be just like last time. I just—I just—“

Gideon scowled and the kid wobbled on his feet, coming dangerously close to tumbling forward. At the same time, Miles’ stomach clenched and then heaved, forcing the excess medication that he had managed to swallow up and out of his throat in a putrid spray of pill-laced vomit that went right through Gideon’s form and barely missed the album still open to Emmett’s face. “I’m about as real as it fucking gets and I’m about to start slamming every goddamn door in this house to wake up your father. Is that what you fucking want? Keep puking, sweetheart. I been around the block enough times to know that’s the only way out of the mess you’re in.”

The teenager made a terrified sound and took three steps to the door, opened it, and pitched forward down the steps like a slinky. Gideon winced, rounding the corner just as Miles hit the bottom in a moaning heap, covered in vomit. He looked feverish instead of pale then and he only barely flipped himself over onto his belly but he seemed incapable of coordinating his limbs to get to his feet.

The anger drained from Gideon’s chest almost as quickly as it had appeared and was replaced with swift, severe concern. “Miles?”

There was no answer, just a rasping, labored breath as Miles struggled to pull himself to the bathroom on the second floor. This time, when Gideon knelt to touch him, his fingers slipped right through the boy and hit the carpet runner he’d landed on. “Miles! C’mon, scout. Say something.”

Another dry, scraping breath that seemed to hurt the teenager on the floor was the only answer that Gideon got. 

“Son of a bitch.” He jumped from the ground and turned to the staircase, vanishing and reappearing in the living room where Hank had rolled over on his side. In Gideon’s experience, there was a difference between touching inanimate objects and touching living things. Objects were easy, sort of. It wasn’t like he could pick up a phone and hold it but he could mash buttons and flip switches and turn knobs.

So he mashed the volume button the remote. Up and up and up until the surround sound system in the living room started to shake the walls. The doors opened and closed, slamming around them, the lights flickered like they were in the middle of a hurricane, and Hank finally sat up blearily. “Miles?” he called, looking around at the electrical storm that was going on in the house. He grasped the remote, yanking it free of Gideon’s touch to hit the mute button.

Upstairs, there was the sound of heaving and scraping. “Shit,” Gideon heard Hank mumble under his breath before he took the stairs two at a time.


	7. Miles

Three days. 

Seventy-two hours.

Too many minutes for Miles to count or care about, each punctuated by the familiar scratch of standard issue stark white bed sheets and the steady thump-thump-thump of the kid in the room next door hitting his head off of the wall while he attempted to have a conversation with someone in Miles’ room—someone that was not Miles himself. Evidently, hallucinations were common.

Must be something in the water around here, Miles told himself cynically on the last day as his wall-mate, Bryson, sat staring vacantly at the linoleum floor just beyond the set of steel double doors. Miles was on one side, Bryson on the other—separated by reinforced digital and analog locks and one small square of bulletproof glass.

The Eastern Connecticut Psychiatric Hospital was more like a prison than a place of healing and Miles was itching to get out of it after his three day mandatory hold, during which a doctor had determined that he was not, in fact, suicidal. He’d had an anxiety attack, panicked, and tried desperately swallowing his medication in an attempt to block out the paranoia. Miles allowed him to believe that. He allowed the good doctor to converse in hushed tones with Hank just out of reach of his auditory senses. They were talking about him. He knew that. Hank was likely relaying the sob story of the past year and some odd months of Miles’ life—the accident, the resuscitations, Clarissa dying, the sudden onset of paranoia, hallucinations, and extreme, overwhelming feelings of guilt.

Miles was beyond the point of caring what they thought because he knew the reality of it. He knew that a hurricane couldn’t wake Henry Kimberley up after a long night spent at a hospital with a critical patient. He knew that despite his tumble down the stairs, the noise that it created, and his vomiting in the hallway, Hank would never have woken up without outside intervention.

He’d known it, lying on the floor while he drowned in a puddle of his own vomit, his eyes upturned toward the photograph on the far wall…if it hadn’t been for the part of Gideon Cicorella that remained in the world of the living, Miles would have joined the world of the dead. It was no longer something he could deny or skirt around. It was just something he had to live with.

The house was haunted.

Miles pushed soft, messy curls out of his eyes as Hank led him out to the car with a handful of discharge paperwork tucked under his arm. His father was silent and Miles couldn’t tell if he was super pissed off or exhausted or some combination of both. He remained that way until the doors snapped shut in the car. 

Hank dumped the papers into the center console and clutched the steering wheel in a white knuckled grip. He took a deep breath and Miles ran his thumbnail along the seam of the cherry paneling in the Lexus, doing absolutely everything in his power to avoid looking at Hank. There was a part of him that was deeply disappointed in himself for having lost control so easily in the wake of something that he couldn’t explain. Once upon a time, he and Clarissa had lay up on the roof and talked about how they believed in aliens. Clarissa would have been thrilled by the idea of a ghost in their house. She would have bought Ouija boards and lit candles. She would have tried to communicate while Miles and Charlie rolled their eyes beside her. Miles would have eventually gone along with it. Charlie would have tried to distract her with kisses or by rough housing with Miles.

“Miles…” Hank started quietly and there was an unfamiliar uncertainty in his voice. Hank Kimberley was usually so cheerful. He was the doctor that brought stuffed animals to see his tender age patients so that he could ‘talk’ through the toy, which was always wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope. He was always hyper-aware of the emotions of people around him. Margot once called him an ‘empath’ and Hank’s devotion to his patients was ultimately what destroyed their marriage. Still—in all of Miles’ memory, he had never heard his father sound so despondent…so utterly lost. His cheer was gone. His confidence was nowhere to be found and for the first time, Miles realized how old his father could look. 

The lines around Hank’s mouth, usually stretched in a bright smile, were creased with concern and his brows were drawn together in uncertainty. “Hank, I—“ Miles started and his father lifted a hand, waving it dismissively to cut him off.

“I know that I wasn’t around a lot for you or…or your sister,” Hank began again, his voice low and hoarse. They both flinched at the mention of Clarissa. His fingers flexed around the wheel and Miles tried desperately to shrink into his seat like maybe he could disappear under it. Instead, his only option was to remain in the car and to listen to whatever his father had to say. 

Turning to him, Hank continued. “But I’m here now, you know.” It was phrased like a question, but it lacked the inflection of one and it was clear to Miles that ‘I’m here now’ was a statement of fact. He only nodded in response. “You can talk to me. You could have woken me up if you were feeling that terrible. You could have stayed home from school if school is an issue.”

“School isn’t an issue,” Miles argued weakly. “I have friends at school. You met Trevor. Dr. Gilbrandt’s son, Preston, he hangs with us and his girlfriend, Georgia…she tags along. I’ve never had trouble at school, Hank. I didn’t try to kill myself.” Not again, at least…and even then, the last time had been unintentional, really. Seeing Clarissa’s blue face in every sink, tub, or bowl of water had convinced his already unstable mind that he could find her if he just…went after her. “I panicked. It won’t happen again.”

“You don’t know that,” Hank reminded him. “You’re sick, Miles.”

Discomfort plagued him low in his gut and Miles shifted in his seat. “Don’t be like that.”

Hank’s hands lifted and collided with the steering wheel, fraught with anger and frustration and Miles jumped, his right side thumping against the passenger’s door. His blue eyes grew marginally wider and fixed on his father’s face, which was hanging low between his shoulders. “I can’t do this again, kiddo. I can’t bury you too.”

Shame dug deep into Miles’ stomach, twisting like a den of snakes. It was easy to forget that Hank had lost Clarissa and Margot too. Despite the divorce, it was obvious to both of their children that their parents were still very much in love. Hank’s dedication to his work had just become…an unavoidable problem that left their little family bleeding out after every late night argument. The divorce was convenient. Hank was not going to change. Margot was not going to stop advocating for him to spend more time at home. His father put on such a happy front, despite all of it—despite Margot having gone straight from an ambulance to a morgue, despite Clarissa laying on life support for upwards of a week while her brain function deteriorated—somehow, Hank still smiled and Miles couldn’t.

“You won’t have to,” the teenager promised gently, reaching out with hesitant to fingers to lay his hand on his father’s arm. Hank wouldn’t have to because Miles was done trying to explain away what was happening in the house.

He fully intended to confront it when they arrived at home.

Nodding stiffly, Hank simply pulled out of the parking lot and for a majority of the ride, they sat in stony silence with a muffled radio playing. The discomfort didn’t drift away until a Beatles song came on that Hank recognized and he launched into a story about when they’d bought their first house and how Margot had played that album for Miles and Clarissa and they’d spent the day doing cartwheels in the empty master bedroom while their parents unpacked.

The tension slowly dissolved and by the time they were pulling into the driveway, Hank was offering to order Chinese food and go pick it up if Miles kept his phone on him—just in case. “I’m fine,” he promised again, leaning in to the passenger’s side of the car. “You heard the doctor, Hank. It was just an anxiety attack, probably brought on by the move. But I’m fine. I’m just going up to my room to unpack.” He held up the bag that Hank had brought him the first day at the hospital and waved it a little bit.

“I put that photo album you had open on your bed. Your vomit missed it,” his father said dryly, raising an eyebrow. “Were those the kids in the picture in the hall?”

Miles shrugged. “I did some historical research on the house. Trevor’s mom is real into local family lineage and stuff.”

“A hobby!” Hank explained. “Miles has a hobby!” He put his hand over his chest like the very concept was giving him heart pain and Miles rolled his eyes.

“Ugh,” he exclaimed. “You’re being such a dad. Go.” He exited the window and tapped the hood of the car once on his way to the house, bag slung over his shoulder. He heard the gravel crunch under the wheels and Hank beeped twice on his way down their narrow, winding driveway.

To anyone else, it might have seemed ridiculous to leave Miles alone in such a fragile state, especially for a doctor, but Hank and Miles’ relationship had never been normal and Hank put a great deal of emphasis on building trust. This was a test. Passing it would greatly decrease the amount of hovering Hank was going to do over his shoulder in the next few weeks.

Miles made his way up to the attic, stopping only once to narrow his eyes at the photograph of Gideon Cicorella in the hallway. He took the stairs two at a time, slung his bag into the middle of the floor and flexed his fingers.

“Okay, son of a bitch,” he breathed, exhaling loudly. “I know that you’re here, Gideon. Why don’t you come out and talk to me?”

For a moment, nothing happened and then the unfamiliar smell of tobacco flooded the room. The temperature dropped significantly. The bed made a squeaking noise as the springs strained under fresh weight, though it didn’t move at all, and then the album on it flipped open to the page with the picture of Emmett Rosslyn in Gideon’s car.

Miles felt his heart flutter, dancing in his chest. There was nothing quite as good as realizing that you weren’t going crazy. He rolled his shoulders like he was ready to fight. “Why can’t I see you now? I saw you that night at the piano, didn’t I? And I saw you the other day. You—“ He hesitated. “You stopped me. You woke up my father. You saved my life.”

There was another prolonged silence and then a thin, shimmering shape took form beside the bed. It wasn’t solid. Hell, it was barely visible but it solidified with time until it was a trembling, flickering picture like an old film screen. It was more solid now than it was the night by the piano, but less solid than it had been when it had been able to touch him.

It, Miles grumbled internally. Not an it. A he. 

“You can see me,” Gideon said softly and his voice sounded like it echoed across centuries, stirred from the very foundation of the house. It was like trying to listen to someone talk in a cavernous hallway, trying to figure out where the voice began and where it finally dissipated. 

“You scared the shit out of me for weeks!” Miles snapped, brows furrowed in obvious irritation. “What the fuck, man?”

A small smile crossed the phantom’s features and Miles’ heart sped up, racing in his chest so hard and loud that he was certain Gideon could hear it. “This is my house,” Gideon told him plainly. “You’re intruding.”

“You’re dead,” Miles reminded him, his scowl deepening. It softened almost immediately when Gideon looked down at the album at the mention of the word ‘dead.’ Spectral fingers lifted and then slid down through the air as if they could touch the book but they sifted right through like sand through an hourglass. 

The ghost frowned. “I am,” he agreed. His fingers hovered over the picture of Emmett. “Is he?”

Miles was quiet. He took a careful step forward, trying not to think about how ridiculous it was that he was scared of spooking a ghost. Gideon gave no indication that his proximity was at all startling and so Miles leaned over to look. “Emmett Rosslyn? Yeah, he is.”

The room grew colder and something that Miles immediately recognized as profound grief crossed Gideon’s features. “I see,” he answered quietly. “Thank you, Miles.”

And then he was gone. Just like that. As if he had never been there. The form beside the bed shimmered into invisibility and Miles was left standing at the foot of his bed alone, fists clenched, staring down at Emmett Rosslyn’s grinning face.

“I know you’re still here,” he eventually said, his ears perking up as he heard Hank’s car trundle back into the driveway. “I want you to know that I appreciate what you did for me…and that you can talk to me. If you want. I won’t tell anyone you’re here unless you let me.”

The album snapped shut in response and Miles got the distinct sensation that he was alone in his room just as Hank called his name from the first floor.


	8. Gideon

Gideon spent what felt like days in a state that was somewhere to the left of reality. How had he forgotten everything about Emmett Rosslyn? How had he tucked away those nights on the cliffs, their legs hanging over the edge and a bottle of obscenely expensive brandy sitting between them? How had he never recalled that first kiss, flavored with that same brandy and a touch of cinnamon—so hot that it had stung on his tongue and at the back of his throat. He’d been so panicked that night. Terrified, really, and he’d torn off like a bat out of hell…left Emmett standing on the cliffs with a half-empty bottle of liquor in his hand, calling after him.

He’d gotten halfway home with his hands white-knuckled on the wheel before he turned around and gone back for him, spent the rest of the night drunk and getting to know what Emmett felt like under his clothes.

He remembered now, of course. Now that Miles had woken something up in him that he’d cut off from the rest of his memories. He hadn’t forgotten Emmett Rosslyn entirely, of course. He knew the name, recognized the face, and had thought him in regards to Ava over the years but he hadn’t ever thought about how nights had become theirs. Why would he? It was just a reminder of everything they’d done wrong…how sick he was and how he’d let it spread to Em like a malignant cancer. He remembered now…remembered how much he’d hated himself for what he’d done to them. It was his disease, after all. Something he’d come to realize he was afflicted with during the war and he’d played fast and loose with Emmett until it bled over, ink across the pages of his life leaving stains on the pages of Emmett’s.

Fuck Miles Kimberly, he thought to himself, but he didn’t real feel any true hatred for the boy. Miles hadn’t made him what he was. Miles had just woken it up.

Gideon retreated from awareness, hovering in the alcove of Miles’s room for the most part, watching the kid do his homework or flick through pictures on that thing he kept in his pocket that Gideon had deduced was a phone-camera-letter writer. He hadn’t decided which category it was supposed to go in and thus considered it all of the above. Miles was quite fond of it, though he couldn’t bring himself to understand why.

When he wasn’t buried in his phone, he tried talking. To his credit, Miles Kimberly did seem appreciative of Gideon. He was alive because his ghostly shadow had intervened. He seemed to think he owed him something, but Gideon considered them even because for all the cursing and the deep, soul-rending hate that he now felt for himself, he was grateful to have seen Emmett’s face again. He was grateful to be able to think about those days in Emmett’s bed, tangled in Egyptian cotton sheets, sharing cigarettes and alcohol, fucking like rabbits.

Gideon was quiet though. Perhaps introspective was the better word for it. Miles was careful to leave that photo book out on his desk, flipped to the page of Gideon and Emmett standing against the black car.

He remembered that day. It was after the war, after the day at the cliff, after that first night in Emmett’s condo. He’d never felt such a conflicting cocktail of emotions as he had that day, but overwhelming joy had won out. He didn’t feel quite so alone knowing that Emmett felt the way that he did. It wasn’t until later that the comparison of himself to a fucking cancer came up. 

If he was honest with himself (which was very rare indeed) Gideon would have admitted that he had loved Emmett Rosslyn more than he had ever loved anyone or anything in the entirety of his short life. After Emmett, every decision had new significance because he was orienting his life to accommodate time for a man that could never be his. Who, in fact, belonged to his sister. He’d stopped thinking about the war, about the diagnosis of “combat neurosis” upon his return to civilian life. The trenches didn’t matter. Emmett didn’t allow time to think about it. The nightmares stopped when he slept beside him. He’d become more responsible…less hedonistic. His thoughts no longer centered around himself.

It didn’t matter anymore.

Emmett Rosslyn, like him, was dead. Only Emmett was not coming back. Emmett was at rest, probably buried next to a beautiful wife that he’d had beautiful babies with somewhere on the west coast because that had always been his plan—California. Far away from the east, far away from everyone he knew, somewhere on beach on the Pacific.

That had been the plan that night, after all. It was fuzzy. Gideon had never been able to remember exactly how he’d died, only that he was supposed to get on a train to Sacramento and he’d never made it.

Miles came home one day several weeks after that photo album incident and dropped his bag on the bed next to where Gideon was laying, staring up at the ceiling with his cigarette in his mouth. “I know you’re here,” the teenager informed him grimly. “I can smell your cigarettes.”

Gideon’s eyes crossed when he looked down at the stick between his lips. He blew a smoke ring in response, heaved a sigh, and did not deign to answer. 

The silence only made Miles, who already seemed irritated, even more…irritated. He swiped chestnut colored curls out of dark, grayish eyes. Gray today, Gideon thought. It was always hard to tell with Miles. That’s not to say his eyes changed color, that would have been absurd. They most certainly did not, but they seemed bluer sometimes and more gray sometimes. It all really depended on what he was wearing and the expression on his face. Today was gray, storm tossed like the Atlantic during hurricane season. “This sulking is getting ridiculous, you know?” Miles tore open his backpack as he spoke, digging around in it until he came back up with a manila folder. “I did more research on your boyfriend.”

Gideon snorted. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“He speaks!” Miles exclaimed, throwing the folder down on the desk as Gideon shimmered into view. “And you’re on my bed. I have to sleep there, you know. I don’t want to be lying with a corpse.”

“I’m not a corpse, boy scout. I’d be less attractive after this much time, I think. And in the ground…which I am obviously not.” He pushed himself to his feet with sluggish movements, playing up the appearance of exhaustion as he made his way to Miles’s desk. Miles was kind enough to open the folder for him, which was full of old photographs, newspaper clippings printed on clean, fresh paper, and copies of ancient looking letters. 

Miles made a face, something between confusion and skepticism. “Yeah, sure,” he drawled. Gideon ignored the lack of belief in his tone and stared down at the photographs. His companion let him stare for a moment before he launched into an explanation. “So Emmett Rosslyn moved to Sacramento, then San Francisco. That’s where died, some ten years ago or so.”

“Ten years? That’s it?”

The teen nodded, propping his head up in his hand. “My friend Trevor…her mom runs the historical society in Bridgedale. She told me that Rosslyn never came back to Connecticut, even though he kept his condo here and his will dictates that the condo is not to be sold. In fact, his son loses his inheritance if that property is sold. It all gets donated to some LGBT youth home in Providence.”

“An LG what?”

They stared at each other. Gideon’s brow was drawn together and his nose was wrinkled, giving him an overall look of concentration and disgust. Miles narrowed his eyes, like he wasn’t entirely sure if he was about to be quizzed or punched. “It’s a safety house for at risk gay kids.”

Gideon was still staring, expression unchanged.

Miles cleared his throat. “Jesus Christ,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “I need to leave some social history books open for you. Homosexuals? You know…men who are into men…? Ladies that like ladies? Ringing any bells?” He was making a weighing motion with both of his hands, moving them up and down in tandem.

“Those exist?” Gideon felt that familiar twist of illness in his stomach. It was guilt, hot and heavy…guilt over involving Emmett in any of this…in so much of it that decades later, he had this bizarre clause in his estate.

“Uh, yeah. You know, shit changed. We became less barbaric as a people. Not by a lot. We’re still pretty fucking awful as a whole, but some progress is better than nothing, right? This is totally run-of-the-mill, normal shit now. Hank’s totally cool with it.”

“Your father is okay with this?” There was a long pause during which they stared at each other, Gideon’s hazel eyes widening marginally when realization over the entire meaning of the statement finally struck him. “So you’re…”

“Gay. Completely. Anyway—“ Miles shrugged and flipped the page. “I drove out to the city and took a look at the records for the borough that condo is in. I also took a look at train records from the day you disappeared. There’s no Emmett Rosslyn on the manifest until three days after you were reported missing.”

Gideon ignored the information for a minute. If he were capable of sweating, he was sure his palms would have been. He remembered something that Emmett had said once…

Lying on the roof of the building that housed the condo, staring up at the stars and drinking…Gideon was facing one way, Emmett the other, so that they were lying cheek to cheek. If he listened carefully, he could hear Emmett’s heartbeat and when he leaned in, face turned, he could feel the scratch of Emmett’s blond stubble on his cheek and his mouth. He remembered kissing him, breathless and hungry and hating himself. It was the night he admitted to thinking that everything was his fault—that Ava and Emmett wouldn’t get married because of him, that Emmett had this toxic disease because of him, that they were both going to burn in some eternal hell because of him and it was okay if Gideon did, he was going to anyway, but Emmett was good. He was good at his core, the kind of person that would have given someone the shirt off his back even if it was the last one he had. 

And when he’d admitted that—that he thought he’d poisoned him, that something black was writ across Emmett’s soul now all because Gideon had shown up in his life—Emmett had turned to speak against his ear. “Someday in the future, we’re going to tell our story to someone else and they’ll see how much I love you, they’ll know real it is, and they’ll understand that it’s right. There’s nothing wrong with you, Gids. There never was.”

He hadn’t believed him then. To some degree, he didn’t believe Miles now…but Miles was intelligent. He was ‘of the future’ so to speak. 

“Are you listening to me?” Miles cut into his thoughts, snapping his fingers in front of him. Gideon jumped, his eyes re-focusing after glazing over through the memory. It had been so real he could almost smell the Atlantic and taste the wine on Emmett’s breath. 

He shook his head. “Sorry,” came the mumbled response. “They really don’t think you’re sick? Nobody tries…to fix you? Because they would have…I would have ended up in an asylum, you know? Chained to a wall until someone drilled my fucking brains out through my eye.”

Miles just blinked, a modicum of horror crossing his features. “That would be illegal now. Lobotomies are generally unacceptable in modern society. Unless you’re a Kennedy, but that’s an entirely different story.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“No kidding, Sherlock. You and I are going to have to do some serious catching up. I’ll start leaving the history channel on when I leave. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

“You said something about Emmett?”

Miles smacked his lips together. “I said that he was here when you disappeared. In Bridgedale. He did not get on the train.”

“Disappeared?”

Miles looked at him like he’d been slapped in the face and Gideon stared back, his bottom lip tucked nervously between his teeth. Sure, he didn’t remember a whole lot about the months that had followed his death, but disappeared? “You said earlier that if you were a corpse you would be underground,” Miles began. “Do you know where?”

He shrugged. “Bridgedale Cemetery, probably. Next to my parents. Dad’s name was Giancarlo. Mom was Margaret. It’s in the corner under that big silver maple.”

There was another long, heavy feeling silence and Gideon took a step away from the photo album. At the same time, Miles carefully got to his feet. “Look, I know seeing those pictures fucked you up. I get it. I lost people. So I hate being the person to tell you this, Gideon…but you’re not in Bridgedale. Nobody ever found your body. Nobody knows what happened to you. You’re like Bridgedale’s great white whale.”

It was bizarre to feel like he was hyperventilating when he didn’t actually possess lungs, but the sensation was there. He’d always assumed he didn’t remember dying because it had been awful, but he’d never imagined that he’d never been found. That didn’t happen to people like him…that happened to…other people. Other people had tragedies like that. He’d convinced himself years ago that he probably wrecked his car after the train station. He’d been pretty torn up. He remembered crying, punching the steering wheel until his knuckles bled, screaming until his throat was raw as he drove…but he didn’t remember ever getting home.

He’d just woken up in the attic and he’d been in the house since then. “I—“ he started. “I should…I have to go.”

“Gideon—“

He ignored Miles, fading from view even when the teenager cursed and pleaded with him to stay.


	9. Miles

For a brief moment in time, Miles Kimberly had been hopeful that his freshly minted acquaintance with the ghost in his house would lead to some answers regarding the disappearance of the Cicorella heir. Like most things in his life, however, it was turning out to be far more complicated than he had ever anticipated it being. He’d foolishly led himself to believe that he—a seventeen-year-old kid from Vegas—could figure out the answer to a cold case older than almost every living person on the planet and he’d done so because he had an in that nobody else had.

At some point in the past few months, he’d become some kind of medium or a psychic or that kid from the Sixth Sense. He had a direct line to the victim of the crime. A real direct line, not some made up bullshit deduced from the environment by overly tanned ladies from New Jersey on the television psychic shows. He could really talk to Gideon. He could really see Gideon.

And Gideon could tell him absolutely nothing.

Miles thought it over a few nights after Gideon’s mind-blowing discovery that people could be out of the closet in the twenty-first century. He had only seen the dead kid a few times since then and it had been in brief, short bursts—just glimpses of him in the periphery. He’d seen him walking along the porch in circles, balancing on the railings with his arms wide. He’d seen him face down on top of the piano, one arm hanging listlessly off the side, whistling ‘My Darling Clementine’ over and over again. He’d seen him standing in the hall, staring at that massive picture, his eyes glued to the face of his long-dead sister.

He wondered if Gideon missed Ava the way that he missed Clarissa. He wondered if the dead felt emotion the same way that the living did. He’d made an educated guess that they did, using Gideon’s reaction to Emmett Rosslyn as a baseline. Mrs. Trevor had been correct in assuming that they were probably involved, though Miles wasn’t entirely sure how deeply they were involved. The phantom that occupied his home had never come right out and said that he’d been screwing around with Rosslyn, but Miles got the feeling that their conversation implied it. He just couldn’t be certain unless he asked.

That opportunity didn’t take long to manifest.

Miles came home from school one afternoon on a Friday expecting to find Hank bopping around the kitchen, pretending he could cook. Instead, he found Gideon seated on the cement colored counter (which may have actually been cement, but Miles knew as much about stone as he did about who really killed Gideon Cicorella). He was staring at the refrigerator, trademark cigarette tucked behind his ear, his legs swinging off the edge of the counter. 

“Hank is working late,” the ghost informed him, gesturing to a note on the table. “He left you money to order food. A dollar says you order pizza.”

“High stakes,” Miles drawled, slinging his backpack onto one of the stools at the kitchen island. “I owe you a dollar.”

“I’ll make sure I don’t spend it in one place.”

Miles snorted and Gideon shot him a grin. “Why are you down here, anyway? You’re usually upstairs or moping on the piano, tragedy that you are.” That, at least, wasn’t sarcasm, though it was designed to sound as such. Gideon Cicorella was a tragedy—young and beautiful and from what Miles could see, surprisingly down-to-earth and quick to care about the people around him, even if they were separated by whatever made the living and the dead exist in different places. Halley Trevor had called him a hedonist and implied that he was accustomed to decadence and luxury, but everything Miles had discovered seemed to scream the opposite.

“I am critiquing your childhood art,” Gideon explained, his nose in the air like he was putting on a show. He gestured vaguely at the childish drawings on the refrigerator, belonging to both Miles and Clarissa, and then he pointed at one with an M scrawled in the corner. “That one is particularly droll. Terrible use of shading. Obviously has no education in the neo-classics.”

Miles rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh. And you’re Vincent Van Gogh, aren’t you? Or maybe DaVinci? You know, I heard he used to sleep with his male models. Quite the scandal.”

“Quite.” Gideon raised an eyebrow. “Are you implying something?”

The teenager took his phone from his pocket, scrolling through an app for a pizza delivery service. He ordered quickly, locked the screen, and dropped the gadget on the counter while Gideon slid down to his feet. He leaned on the fridge, arms crossed, staring hard in a way that made him look like the pictures of Giancarlo…except Gideon’s eyes were hazel, the same warm toffee brown as Giancarlo’s mixed with Kelly green. 

Miles pursed his lips, staring back, and his eyes narrowed. He briefly entertained shrugging and ignoring the question but Gideon looked prepared to press for answers. “Were you sleeping with Emmett Rosslyn?”

He’d expected indignant denial, as per the time period that Gideon originated from, or he expected feigned shock and disgust at the very suggestion. He got neither. For a long, pregnant moment that seemed so heavy it was suffocating, Gideon simply stared at him. His expression was stone cold, more dead than alive, and Miles thought about taking back the question and retreating to one of the rooms that Gideon never showed up in—his father’s office or the master bedroom. Hank wouldn’t care if he camped out in there to do his homework, as weird as it would have seemed to outsiders. 

“If I answer that, will you answer something?” Gideon eventually inquired, his head tipped to one side like he was measuring Miles…trying to deduce the sort of answer he was going to get.

Miles wrinkled his nose. “Depends on the question. Why do you want to know about me?”

“Because you did historical research on me like some weird little stalker and all I know is that your name is Miles and you’re sick.”

“Sick,” Miles laughed and lifted his shoulders in defeat. There were questions he didn’t want to answer, sure, but Gideon raised a fair point and who was the ghost going to tell? As far as Miles could tell, Hank couldn’t see him. In fact, nobody could see him but Miles and occasionally that made him wonder if Gideon was really there but then he’d seen Hank react to Gideon pushing a carton of orange juice off of the kitchen table one morning last week. His belief that the phantom was real had solidified quite a lot in that moment. Eventually, he nodded. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

Gideon’s jaw tightened momentarily. “Yes.” His answer came with rigid shoulders and stiff posture, arms still crossed in a defensive position. “I was sleeping with Emmett. I—it was more than that. It doesn’t matter. He’s dead. So am I. What happened to your sister?”

That was an unexpected inquiry. Miles froze and felt his heart shudder in his chest, twisting uncomfortably before it sank slowly to the floor like his insides were weighted with lead. His mouth went dry and he looked anywhere but at Gideon, choosing instead to focus on the speckling pattern in the counter. “An accident,” he eventually mumbled.

“Miles.”

He huffed. “A car accident.” He cleared his throat and then looked up, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth while he shifted from one foot to the other in nervous anticipation. This was not a conversation he had lightly. He didn’t talk about Clarissa. Hank didn’t talk about Clarissa. It was easier for both of them if they just pretended nothing was wrong. Miles could go on. He could let the guilt fester, eating away his insides like a slow working acid. Hank could throw himself into work and keep telling himself that eventually, he would save enough people that it would make up for failing to save Clair or even Margot. 

Miles pressed his hands over his eyes and Gideon remained where he was, watching him squirm with an unflinchingly icy expression. It was almost like he got some satisfaction out of it. Turnabout was fair play though. Miles had asked something uncomfortable and deeply personal. He should have expected to get a dose of his own medicine.

He heaved a long sigh and sat down. Then he ran his fingers over his face, back through his hair, and wove them together at the back of his neck. “I was driving. I wrecked the car. We went off the side of the bridge and fell thirty feet into a reservoir. My mother, Margot…she died on impact. Her neck snapped when we hit. Fun fact—hitting water from a height is like hitting concrete. Clarissa and I didn’t though. My airbag deployed and she was in the back. The car filled with water. We couldn’t get the doors open. We both drowned…only I came back and she…” He lifted his shoulders again. “She didn’t.”

The silence that came after Miles’s mouth shut was long and cold. Gideon sat down in the chair next to him after kicking his bag to the ground. “You think that’s your fault?” he asked eventually.

“I was distracted. I wasn’t paying enough attention. If I’d seen the woman beside us merge, I could have stopped. I could have—“ He shook his head and pushed his chair out, moving like he was going to stand but he stopped, staring down at the toes of his shoes instead. “Doesn’t matter anymore. She’s dead. So is Mom. Hank has their ashes in his office if you’re as morbidly curious as you seem.”

For Miles, seeing the similarities of their situations was simple. The roles were reversed somewhat, but the mirror image was there. In all likelihood and according to all the evidence that he had gathered, Emmett or Ava had killed Gideon just like Miles had killed Clarissa. Ava had spent the rest of her life pouring her guilt into philanthropic ventures. Miles had tried to drown his out with a bottle of pain killers and stolen vodka. Gideon had been sleeping with Emmett Rosslyn, Ava’s fiancé. Miles had been sleeping with Charlie Rosenthal, Clarissa’s boyfriend. In fact, it had been Charlie that sent the text that had distracted him that night and although the accident had been declared the other driver’s fault, Miles still felt that if he’d been paying more attention, maybe he could have prevented that driver’s mistake from being as catastrophic as it was.

Gideon was staring again, only the cold expression was gone and replaced with something like sympathy. “You didn’t kill her,” he pointed out quietly.

“I might as well have. I still remember the water. I remember how cold it was and how much it hurts to not be able to breathe. You hold your breath and you hold your breath and you keep fucking holding your breath but eventually your lungs force you to open your mouth and all you get is water. And in that small moment where you’re still conscious for it, it fucking stings down your chest and up through your nose and your eyes would be watering if you weren’t already submerged. And it’s so fucking terrifying…and that’s the last thing she ever knew.” He lifted a hand and wiped at his mouth, trying to banish the taste of reservoir water from rising in his throat, cheap and metallic. 

Gideon clicked his tongue. “Yeah,” he answered flatly. “I know what dying feels like. I also know what she would feel like watching you do this to yourself. Ava used to sit in front of that stupid picture and cry over me. She wasted her entire fucking life grieving. Don’t do that to Clarissa. Don’t make her the anchor you use to justify all of this wallowing.” The ghost gestured to him, as if to indicate Miles as a whole. 

Miles thought about telling him. For a second, he wondered what Gideon would say if he knew that everyone thought Ava was responsible for killing him. Sure, when it had happened, the police in Bridgeport had never believed Ava Maria—a delicate looking little dancer—could ever cause physical harm to her veteran brother who had seen combat in the first world war. 

But now? Most historians agreed: Ava Maria had killed Gideon and buried him somewhere on the grounds of the Cicorella estate.

He wondered how heartbreaking it would be to find that out…he tried to imagine how he would feel if he learned that Clarissa had murdered him and disposed of his body like so much trash. His gut twisted painfully and his lungs seemed to shrivel in his chest. Instead of outing the information, he took a deep breath. “Ava wanted to know what happened to you,” he said quietly. “I’m going to find out. I promise.”


End file.
